Martin Wendiggensen

The Real AI Race – Disinformation In The Taiwanese Election

AI disinformation, deep fakes, armies of lying bots, and automated deception is the biggest threat to our elections — or so we’ve been told. But looking at Taiwan’s recent election, none of these nightmare scenarios materialized. The deafening silence of effective AI disinformation from China, America’s most advanced opponent, was surprising. Even more so given the focus on the election at the highest levels of the Chinese government.

I set out to study the election and collected tens of thousands of hours of footage from YouTube and television as well as hundreds of thousands of news articles, blog posts, and social media content. This collection was then analyzed with a multi-modal AI pipeline. The results indicate that the small amount of AI-content received no engagement and had no impact.

Instead, Taiwanese billionaires (who earn most of their money in China) mounted a concerted effort to buy or set up local news outlets in Taiwan in the run-up to the election. Conducting a large-scale analysis of these outlets’ output uncovers interesting results. Their viewership, numbering in the millions, was presented slanted narratives which align with the Beijing-friendly KMT and a new emergent third party. While losing the presidential election, these two parties managed to wrest control of Taiwan’s parliament.

This presentation will guide the audience through Chinese and local disinformation efforts in the Taiwanese election, and it will highlight the main lessons that can be drawn from them to safeguard future elections. Also covered will be the research methodology and toolbox that leverages AI to fight disinformation.

Martin Wendiggensen is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Alperovitch Institute, focusing on Great Power Competition in Cyberspace, especially competition around AI and state-sponsored information operations. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science with a focus on quantitative methods and Natural Language Processing from the University of Mannheim and studied in China, Israel, and Italy. After working as policy advisor to a member of the German National Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Martin received a Master’s degree in International Relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS. He has conducted research at NATO as well as the University of Mannheim, and applied his knowledge in Artificial Intelligence at his own small startup, which won contracts to monitor electoral environments. Currently, he is conducting research on AI-generated content using Advanced Research Computing at Hopkins.